Twelve episodes. Nineteen source chapters. One hole punched through a villain’s chest. Black Torch ends exactly the way a cancelled manga adaptation probably should and somehow that makes it both the worst and most honest finale the show could have produced.
Amagi Looked Cooler Than the Protagonist
The finale makes very clear that the author genuinely loves Amagi. He smiles suavely, smokes before he dissipates, and carries himself with the kind of presence the show never quite figured out how to give Jiro consistently. For a finale that is supposed to be the protagonist’s moment, the villain walking away with more screen charisma is a problem the episode does not solve.
Jiro’s core issue across twelve episodes is that most of his personality exists in reaction to Rago rather than independent of him. He is Ichigo without the Kurosaki family, without Karakura Town, without the specific texture that made those relationships feel like stakes. The Jiro and Rago bond is still the best thing the show produced and the finale leans on that appropriately, but it cannot entirely compensate for how passive Jiro reads in the moments where the story needs him to feel like its center.
The bigger picture though is that none of this is entirely the show’s fault. Nineteen chapters adapted across twelve episodes leaves almost no room for the story to breathe and the exact moment the manga cancellation starts showing in the pacing is visible in hindsight from about episode eight onward.
The fandom has been asking why the studio did not collaborate with the author to build something closer to the story’s original intended direction and that question is completely reasonable. The production quality is genuinely good for an axed manga adaptation and the animation in the finale specifically has some of the strongest cuts in the whole run. That effort landing on a story that was structurally prevented from becoming what it wanted to be is the tragedy of Black Torch in one sentence.
The opening SiM track and the ending theme are legitimate bangers and the fandom is unanimous on that. Jiro and Rago’s partnership was worth watching episode to episode even when everything around it was moving too fast. Ichika arguably has the most compelling backstory of the main three and the show consistently failed to give her fights that matched that interiority. Reiji’s Sasuke energy worked until the final two episodes where the writing pivoted him in a direction that felt genuinely jarring.
What Black Torch actually is, is a perfectly watchable shonen that reads like something from 2013 to 2016 inspired heavily by the Big Three, cancelled before it could establish anything original enough to separate it from those influences.
It is not embarrassing. It is not a hidden gem the publishing industry overlooked. It is an incomplete story that got a complete adaptation and the combination of those two things makes the whole experience feel like a door that almost opened.
The SiM opening alone makes it worth one watch. The Jiro and Rago bond makes it worth finishing. The rest makes you wonder what another fifty chapters could have done with the foundation.
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